


Everything, and Anything

by Vade_ad_infernum



Category: No Fandom
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-10-31
Updated: 1999-10-31
Packaged: 2019-03-20 12:20:28
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,333
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13717569
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Vade_ad_infernum/pseuds/Vade_ad_infernum
Summary: They scream, “What are you running away from?”And you scream back, “Everything and anything.”





	Everything, and Anything

You go to school too young, too innocent, too self-confident—so you hide. You hide behind your own false sense of superiority, behind your eccentricities. You meet Jenny there, meet her laughing in the midst of a group of children, the brightest and cleverest of them all. Jenny twirls and dances through life. She exhales smoke and breathes fire, lighting matches just to watch them burn. You love the attention you receive when you’re with her. You love the adoration, the moments when you forget how empty you are inside because all that is truly real is the laughter and mirth emanating from Jenny’s lanky form. You believe in Jenny with all your young heart. Jenny will save you, because she saves everyone. She’s just that unstoppable.

But as the years go by, it’s too often that you have to save Jenny, carrying her slap-happy drunk self to a bed or couch and then making her drink water the morning after to quell the headaches. Too often, You find yourself watching Jenny down bottle after bottle of poison, watching her drink away all her happiness until she’s left with the fear and disappointment that lie underneath. And yet, even in her inebriated state, Jenny cares for you in a way that none of your other friends do. Jenny wraps protective arms around your shoulders and tells you that the boy you were talking to was bad news, that maybe you should go outside for a minute. She looks down at you sideways and tells you to never start drinking even as she lifts her own bottle for another gulp of alcohol.

Jenny finds Ferdinand at a party somewhere. He starts her on pills, tells her that everything will be fine if she just takes enough. He does it earnestly, dilated eyes unfocused but sincere, like he actually believes in the pills that rattle around in the bottle he hands Jenny. You lose sleep as you stay up with her on the nights she’s taken too much, holding her hand and hoping that it gets better. Jenny’s pupils are blown and fearful as she cracks jokes now, slurring her words carelessly. She stops going out as often, instead opting to stay in her basement. Ferdinand brings Linda, sometimes. They hang out with Jenny and you in Jenny’s basement, quoting movie lines together. Jenny always laughs when Linda brings her Calculus homework along with her, but Linda learns not to mind—Jenny makes fun of everyone, she's kind of an asshole, that's just how it is. It’s nights like this that you wonder why you’re still there, still sitting on the couch, enveloped in the cotton candy flavored smoke from Jenny’s vape, laughing along to the cadence of Jenny’s charisma.

You know you're just fueling her fire. But you don't think you care. 

Frank shows up sometimes too. Frank, with his protruding hip bones and sunken eyes that seem to have lost all their life years ago. His fingers are long and the knuckles jut out—all angles and no curves. It's like there's nothing left inside him and he's just waiting in limbo for the force of nature to finally accept his corpse so he won't be forced to function anymore. You don’t miss how he distributes whatever food that ends up in his bony hands to whomever is closest to him. When the food is pushed at you, you just avert your eyes, telling yourself that it’s not you who’s eating Frank’s food this time, that Frank’s just shoveling it all into his mouth so quickly that you miss it. You feel guilty because there’s something wrong with Frank—you know this from reading books and health classes—but you don’t know how to say anything to him so you don’t. You take his food sadly and feel it churn in your stomach.

“I’m going to become famous,” Jenny says out loud into the emptiness around a mouthful of smoke, “by writing a biography about one of the voices in my head.”

Linda just looks at her condescendingly over her laptop. She pushes up her glasses. “And how many of those voices are up there?”

“Oh,” Jenny says gleefully, “we’ve got a duplex apartment up here.”

Lucy trickles into your lives so gradually that you can’t even remember where exactly you met her first. It seems like she’s always been here; something about her that just fits so you don’t even question it—even when Lucy slams her fist through the wall in a fit of rage. That's normal; that's Lucy. 

Lucy is so full of anger that’s directed at anyone and everyone, even herself. It’s hard to miss the bruises up her arms and down her legs, the black eyes and bloodied noses, and she doesn’t even try to hide the parallel lines that can’t not be intentional lining her arms and legs. She doesn’t flinch as she presses her lit cigarette against her ankle despite the burn mark that forms seconds later, only smiles with glee and rubs a thumb over the mark.

But she’s funny. She plays off Jenny in a way the rest of you can’t, bantering through a split lip in a form of hilarity that leaves you in the dust.

* * *

 

You aren’t aware when everyone starts staying in your room instead of Jenny’s basement. It just, happens. Instead of sitting on the couch in front of Jenny’s TV, they slump on all the flat surfaces of your room, perching themselves on the desk or the chest or even on your bed. They all stay through the hours of dark morning, basking in the red glow of your night lamp. It’s odd, but you’re not worried. They’re your friends, despite what they may seem to the rest of society. They’re all okay.

“Everyone’s a little fucked up,” Lucy reassures you. “We’re just ahead of the curve.”

And you believe it, believe it because you believe in them, wholly, without abandon. It’s reckless and you don’t know when you started putting so much faith in them, but they haven’t abandoned you yet, unlike everyone else, so you don’t say anything, just let them come back again and again, slipping in and out so loudly you wonder why your parents never say anything.

* * *

 It’s on a rare night when the others aren’t in your room when you lie on your back and look up at your fan. Lucy pulled off one of the blades last night, so you can’t turn it on, but your windows are open, at least. The stifling air sifts across your bare legs and you stretch your arms out until there’s no space left. Three quarters of a fan stay resolutely still and the air heats up around your body. Moonlight spills through the hazy red glow and highlights your hands and feet in an eerie fashion. You feel trapped in your own room, and even though you know you could just move and get up, you don’t, not even when Jenny stumbles in and lies down next to you, bringing sweat slick skin and alcoholic breath.

Despite all the new friends the years have brought you, Jenny is your first friend, the one you found on the first day of school as a scared child. Jenny’s stuck with you throughout all these years and you are so grateful for that. You’re grateful even when Jenny turns and nuzzles her nose into the crook of your shoulder and breathes hot air across your neck.

“This is unbearable,” Jenny murmurs into your skin, lips curving into a sad smile, and you feel it more than hear it.

And, _yeah,_  it is unbearable, you think, but you have a sneaking suspicion that it’s for a different reason than Jenny had.

Jenny drinks herself asleep against your side without saying anything else, grin still firmly in place.

* * *

 Your notebooks are all full of Linda’s ramblings, nowadays. They have smears of integrals and lines of endocrine system hormones. You don’t understand all of it, honestly. Linda has tried teaching you, but it usually devolves into Linda just doing your homework for you. What Linda lacks in patience, she makes up in brains.

You seem to meet up almost every night now; the others trickling into your room from all hours between 10 p.m. and 5 a.m., laden with food that Frank won’t eat and booze that’s split between Jenny and Lucy. The red light makes it all hazy and unreal, so when you eventually wake up to your own empty room, the only things that tells you they were actually there are the empty bottles and plates.

You think that it all has to just stop, somewhere. It can’t keep getting worse. But no, Frank details you about the familiar ache that’s in his bones everytime that he wakes up and realizes that he’s still alive; Jenny tells you about the easy glide of her lips into a grin, the way everyone laughs as she tells them her darkest secrets; Linda describes the pounding behind her head as she thinks and thinks and thinks, details her mind’s spiral down; Ferdinand counts off his fingers how many pills he’s taken today, about how little he even feels anymore; Lucy shows you the bruise from where she broke her ribs and laughs as Jenny stubs her fingers into the purple mass of damaged skin.

And you’ve never been told what to do when your friends tell you that they want to die, that they’re broken inside, so you don’t do anything. You sit on your bed and watch them pull themselves apart in the soft red glow.

* * *

 What you don't do is tell them that at least they have  _something_. The thing inside them that makes them hate, or love, or fear, or hope. No matter how broken they are, at least they feel enough to fall apart. 

* * *

 

You don’t know when the others start to follow you to school, but in the middle of English you see Ferdinand slumped across a desk at the back of the room. You glance back a second later and he’s gone so you assume that it's just a trick of the light. It's a few days later when you start seeing Linda deliberately taking notes at the front of your classes, but when you look for her afterwards, all you find is a folder of notes in your backpack that are written in Linda’s tiny, neat handwriting. You start noticing that people only laugh when you repeat the jokes that Jenny’s just said, even though she’s standing right next to you. You notice how people’s gazes slide across Lucy’s obviously bruised face and onto your own when they’re talking to you, how they don’t even spare a glance at the full tray of food that sits in front of Frank as he sets down his fork delicately.

It becomes too overwhelming for you all at once, like you’ve kept it all bottled up and now you’re exploding into several fragments of hopelessness. You find yourself stealing Jenny’s vodka and swallowing the burning sensation into your stomach and reveling in the warm safe feeling afterwards. You take one of Ferdinand’s pills and realize that you fantastically feel nothing. Your grades soar as Linda does all of your homework diligently and without fail.

It’s with reckless abandon that you stay up all night and all day until you crash. You live on alcohol spiked coffee and energy drinks until your hands shake as you watch Linda’s steady ones type your essay on your computer. You watch Jenny take a swig and taste it in your throat as the liquid splashes down your own esophagus. You feel it, now, when someone bumps into Lucy, feel the aches deep in your own body—bruised skin protesting violently and you realize now why Lucy enjoyed it so much. The pain gets you out of yourself until it's not your body anymore.

But, above all, you feel nothing. You feel it more intensely with every pill Ferdinand swallows until there’s nothing left but you and yourselves sprawled across your room. Not caring, that’s what it all boils down to. You lose the ability to question it, to care. You know, distantly, that you’ve hit rock bottom. But you also know that Jenny has a shovel and revel in the feeling as Lucy rips the skin off her hands as you dig, impossibly, deeper.

They’re there all the time, now. Everywhere you go, you see them in your peripherals, just forms and smudges against your retinas. You repeat the jokes Jenny whispers into your ears when you’re happy, answer math questions by Linda’s voice inside your head, tug at the rage that settles low in your belly as you tear the skin off your hands night after night, digging. Deeper; always deeper. You feel them all there, watching you, proud at the mess you’ve become. Their own little disaster.

And now, you may not feel much, but at least you feel them. Maybe that's enough. 

They still follow you to your room, they still laugh with each other—they're still your best friends, this is still where they belong, always where they belong.

* * *

 The coffee cups all smell like Jenny’s vodka and the sheets have paint smeared down them. Linda tears papers apart and Lucy lights her cigarettes off of them, cradling the smoldering ashes in her palm. Ferdinand takes pill after pill until he can’t hold the bottle and it spills across the hardwood floor. A wholly uneaten slice of pizza sits in Frank’s lap and he stares at it, unmoving. It’s silent as you all fall apart, each a singularly vicarious disaster exhaling out your last bit of hope.

They all inhale and exhale in synchronization from their respective places throughout the room, stuck forever in its inky red depths and you sometimes look at them like you don’t know who they are or what they’re doing there.

 


End file.
